Donald Judd met Dan Flavin in 1962 at a gathering in a Brooklyn apartment organized to discuss the possibility of a cooperative artist-run gallery. They exhibited together a year later when their work was included in New Work: Part I at Richard Bellamy’s Green Gallery, New York (January 8–February 2, 1963). As their mutual friend, the artist John Wesley, has said of their friendship, “[the two] became Flavin and Judd for a while. The two names were together.”¹

This work is one of three in an edition that Flavin dedicated to Judd; other pieces Flavin dedicated to Judd include untitled (to Don Judd, colorist) 1–5, 1987. “The lit tubes are intense and very definite,” Judd wrote of Flavin’s fluorescent light art in “Aspects of Flavin’s Work.”²

In his autobiographical text “‘ . . . in daylight or cool white,’” Flavin wrote, “The radiant tube and the shadow cast by its supporting pan seemed ironic enough to hold alone. There was no need to compose this lamp in place; it implanted itself directly, dynamically, dramatically in my workroom wall—a buoyant and relentless gaseous image which, through brilliance, betrayed its physical presence into approximate invisibility.”³

¹ Marianne Stockebrand, “A Conversation with John Wesley,” Chinati Foundation newsletter 10 (October 2005), 1.

² Donald Judd, “Aspects of Flavin’s Work” (1969), in Donald Judd Writings, ed. Flavin Judd and Caitlin Murray (New York: Judd Foundation and David Zwirner Books, 2016), 211.

³ Dan Flavin, “‘ . . . in daylight or cool white.’ An Autobiographical Sketch,” Artforum, December 1965, 24.